Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  Fireworks burst against the stars, and dragons circled, playing pearl, mustaches flowing with long manes in the wind.

  She laughed. She hadn’t expected to laugh, not this deeply, not with her belly. And there were wet tracks on her face. Water from the fall through the reflecting pond, no doubt. She wiped her cheeks dry.

  Dragons danced to the music of ranked drums.

  She looked down.

  The Bizarre she’d seen back in ’26 looked nothing like this. All the magic had been there, the immortals and the monsters and the ghosts, the animal spirits and demons and wizards and jiangshi servants, but back then they’d been forced to blend with everyday commerce. She’d walked through the Bizarre with Ahsan, investigating a murder—but she’d never seen the market like this. Back then the magic had been a tigerish glint in a passing woman’s eye, a hint of water beneath the voice of a thin man selling tea.

  They’d been driven underground since Grace was cursed, but here, and now, they did not need to hide.

  Liam was somewhere among them, escorted by thieves who wouldn’t know a qingniao from a poison zhen. Grace advanced into the crowd. Wang Jianguo did not follow, at first, still transfixed by the dancing pearl. “Are you coming?”

  “Sorry,” Wang said, and sounded much younger. “Yes. Of course.”

  A dazzled spy behind her, and a trio of misguided mystics in front. Excellent. Sal and Arturo really did miss all the fun.

  • • •

  Liam didn’t see how Christina opened the door. She moved just so, and then, when she’d been about to touch the wood, she told him to take a step to the left. He did. She drew a breath, and brushed the door with her fingertip.

  Behind them, the music crescendoed. Something the size of a mountain had a laugh like breaking rocks. Plate glass crashed, or else that was another beast, even more fearsome, also laughing.

  The door slammed open.

  Christina ran her tongue along her lower lip when she was nervous. Had he noticed that, or remembered it?

  “Didn’t think that would work?”

  “I’ve never tried it before,” she said. “This wasn’t really my thing. Yours, mostly.”

  “Well.” He caught himself about to congratulate her. “We’re in.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, shook her head, and entered the Old Lady’s shop.

  At night, the shop looked no dimmer than during the day. Dried herbs still hung from hooks on the walls, and the shears still glistened silver. And the walls were still covered with hair.

  “I hoped the hair would go with her,” Christina said. “It must be longer than I thought.”

  “Can you get through it?”

  “Me?” She paced the shop. Fireworks lit the night outside. “No. Maybe we could use these shears?”

  “I think she’ll notice if we start cutting.”

  “What if you just—” She made a pawing gesture. “Reach in?”

  “Into her hair? You know what that stuff can do.”

  “You’re a Bookburner. You shrug off magic all the time.”

  His brain caught up with the rest of him in time to stop him from arguing. No, his team didn’t have any particular resistance to magic—but they had crosses. Maybe Christina didn’t know. Had she been fooling with magic for this long without a cross? She should be dead, or possessed. Or both. But she seemed fine. “The Old Lady caught me with her hair, remember? I can’t stop this stuff.”

  She sat on the counter and dared him with her eyes. “I imagine it’s easier when she’s not paying attention.”

  He regarded the hair skeptically. It did not move. He reached toward the wall, and the purple-black surface rippled.

  “No way.”

  “I got us in here,” she said. “You need something from the Old Lady’s shop; we need something, too. And this is all your fault.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re the one who left.” She drummed her heels against the counter, then slid off and marched toward him. Took him by the shoulders. Kissed him, before he could pull back.

  Her lips were full and soft and she tasted of mint from the lip gloss and beer from the beer. He kept very still. He wanted her. Memory rolled over and through him. And he remembered how the wires felt, sliding out of his flesh.

  She drew back, and looked so sad his heart followed her. “Damn. I really hoped that would work.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not—I’m not that man anymore.”

  “You could be.”

  “I have friends now.”

  “You had friends before.”

  “I have a mission. We’re saving the world.”

  “What do you think we were doing, Liam?” She was shouting, now.

  “I don’t know.” The world turned beneath him. He couldn’t catch his breath. He tried to remember Sal. Father Menchú. Grace. Asanti, even. “When they found me—”

  “You brought us together, you gave us a purpose, and then you disappeared, and took our work with you. We’ve spent years trying to put it back together, tracing pieces down. If not for you, I would still be in a computer science lab at Trinity crunching numbers and arguing with neckbeards about particle spin. I thought—” She closed her eyes. A firework pop echoed over the courtyard. The crowd roared. “I hoped. But you’re right. You’re a different man, now. I should take care of myself.”

  She thrust her arm toward the glistening black hair.

  He caught her wrist. Gently, he hoped.

  She stared into his eyes. “Do it,” she said. “Or let me.”

  “Fine.”

  He released her. She stepped back.

  He reached into the Old Lady’s hair. It rippled where he touched, but did not cut him. Parted strands lay against his skin, gentle as razors. The cross burned against his chest, tarnishing by the instant.

  “There,” he said. “Flat drawer, third from the top.”

  She opened the drawer. The circlet lay silver against red velvet.

  The cross seared and branded him. Sweat ran down his face, slicked his arms, slid into the Old Lady’s hair. He knew how a cross felt when it was about to fail, and his was close. Seconds away, maybe.

  “Well,” Christina said. “This is awkward.”

  She took the circlet, and set it upon her brow.

  Her eyes burned red, and she began to scream.

  4.

  Grace was forcing a path between two recalcitrant ogres when the pavilion exploded.

  Which settled the question of where she should look for Liam. She wished she’d figured that out a few minutes earlier.

  The pavilion erupted in a geyser of light. That by itself didn’t awe, after the dragons and the fireworks. But the light reflected back down off the underbelly of high clouds—clouds that belonged in the sky over the City God Temple in the real Shanghai, Shanghai above the water, not this looking-glass world the Bizarre had created for itself.

  Magic tore through Grace, cold and hot at once. City lights blinked on, the city skyline wriggling into existence around and above the market. Whatever Liam or his new friends had done, they’d somehow forced the Bizarre and Shanghai together.

  A woman wreathed in light rose from the broken pavilion. Stars burned upon her brow. Her eyes shed radiance wherever she looked. The sky rippled around her. Dragons reared back and roared. Christina.

  Grace rarely swore. Time spent swearing could be better spent solving whatever made you swear in the first place. But sometimes, you had to make exceptions.

  On rooftops around the Bizarre, ASB snipers—confused, terrified, and well-trained—found their target. Lasers danced on the woman’s chest, and then the bullets followed.

  Which, naturally, did not help.

  • • •

  Liam woke to the ringing of bells.

  He was dead, then?

  No. He couldn’t dare hope for harp-and-bell repose after death, though one could always pray and expiate. Besi
des, his head hurt too much for heaven, and he lay beneath a pile of broken timber and slate tile, which didn’t strike him as a particularly heavenly reception—or purgatorial, or even hellish for that matter.

  Still alive, then. For now. That was something, at least.

  He fought his way free of the rubble. “Christina!” His voice sounded muffled. Whatever had happened, it had been loud. And bright—spots danced in his vision. Something whizzed past his leg. He glanced down, and saw a white trail of high-caliber ricochet in the flagstone.

  Take stock. Shop’s destroyed. Chaos. Someone’s shooting? Tom and Christina, maybe? No, they hadn’t brought guns, and Liam would have spotted a backup team. So where did the snipers come from? Grace said the local Bureau couldn’t get people in through the reflecting pool. But—

  He looked past the snipers and saw the Shanghai skyline, chrome and steel and neon and billboards. Oh.

  They weren’t through the reflecting pool anymore.

  And once he was looking up, he couldn’t help but see Christina. She drew the eye like a needle drawing blood: She hovered above the courtyard, shimmering with light and magic. The Ricci Circlet burned on her forehead. Dragons darted in disarray around her, writhing out of range. Snipers on surrounding roofs took aim again, and fired, but she didn’t notice the bullets. She was too busy screaming.

  Ricochets bounced into the dragons, into the crowd. More cries joined Christina’s. Some of the snipers noticed the weirdness of the crowd below, shifted aim, and fired. People fell.

  Monsters, maybe, but people still.

  Goddammit.

  Whatever Christina wanted, it wasn’t this. She might have betrayed him, but she wouldn’t have taken the circlet to expose herself. He ran toward her, eyes heavenward, and stumbled over a fallen body: the four-armed barbecue salesman, with a hole in his head. Liam sheltered behind a large chunk of coral someone had mounted on a pedestal for some reason, and tried not to think about how little protection his improvised cover really offered. His leg was bleeding through his jeans. He didn’t know how he had cut himself.

  Christina had wanted the circlet all along. She couldn’t fight the Old Lady, couldn’t break the rules of the Bizarre. Christina and Tom and the rest of the Network, they were thieves. She’d used him, but she hadn’t wanted this.

  Good detective work, Liam. You could have told that just by looking.

  Molten tears streamed down her cheeks. She’d clenched her eyes tight, but red light leaked through her eyelids all the same. The circlet burned brighter than the light that haloed her.

  Team Four. They’d booby-trapped their headquarters, filled it with constructs to eat anyone who wasn’t part of the Society. They must have done the same to the circlet. A curse, maybe. Oyez oyez, all ye who touch thisse magick crowne shall be fucked with most egregiously. Or something.

  He had to get the circlet off her.

  A ricochet thudded into the coral, and to his surprise didn’t break through, or kill him. The cover worked. Good to know. Shame he couldn’t stay.

  He ran back out into the dark, into the panicked crowd.

  • • •

  Grace had to break two legs and a handful of ribs before she reached Wang Jianguo, though at least they all belonged to other people. Gunfire transformed the dance party into a blender, screaming marketgoers tumbling to the ground to be crushed underfoot, but Grace caught Wang Jianguo as she ran for the nearest alley.

  She knocked the woman to the ground, pinned her there. A bullet winged by overhead, chipping stone. “Call them off.”

  “You’re crazy,” Wang Jianguo spat back. “We can’t let these things loose in our city.” Another volley tore into the crowd. Something hit a dragon; she roared and flicked her tail into a rooftop. “Whoever that is”—Wang pointed up at Liam’s ex—“she has to go down.”

  “You’re killing civilians. Bystanders.”

  “To save the world.” Wang tried to wriggle free, but Grace caught her by the neck. “And these people aren’t innocent.”

  “My friend is out there!”

  “Then he’s a monster too.” Fire from the sky reflected in Wang Jianguo’s eyes, and this time it was a fire Grace didn’t envy. She hissed. “They’re all monsters.”

  “You don’t know what a monster is,” Grace said.

  Then she burned.

  • • •

  Liam waded through the breaking revel. Screams and weeping and the sound of gunfire surrounded him. A courtyard overfull of magic people seemed to go just as mad under fire as a courtyard of the normal variety. A large insect-looking dude scuttled toward him, antennae flicking; Liam didn’t know if that was a good sign or bad, so he dodged and toppled, accidentally, a spindly almost-human thing made of sticks. A bullet hit the insect-dude. He spun and fell and lay twitching.

  “Sam!” Liam shouted, and again. No answer reached him out of this muddy clusterfuck of inhuman suffering. He climbed onto the lip of a fountain, a perfect target: Hi, local sniper jerks, this is me, my name is Liam and I’m a—

  There.

  He dove into the mess again, more like crowd-swimming than -surfing, threw a few good old mosh pit elbows, and after frantic tooth-and-claw seconds caught Sam scampering toward a hole in a nearby wall.

  “Sam!” He considered tackling the hedgehog and decided against it. “Sam, dammit, I need your help.”

  “Help?” Sam rolled himself into a ball, then popped upright, glaring into Liam’s eyes. “You want help? Haven’t you done enough?”

  Oh, yes, he felt the guilt. But there would be time for that later, in confession. “Sam, this isn’t me.” Venial sins, lies. “I didn’t know what she would do.” Truth. “I can stop this. I really can. I just need some help. I need to get up there, to talk to her—”

  “Talk? She’s killing us.” Quills flared on Sam’s shoulders and neck. He tore his arm from Liam’s grip. “You have some nerve to say you want to go up there and talk while we’re dying down here and it’s all your—”

  Three red dots settled on Sam’s chest.

  The hedgehog glanced down. Before Liam had a chance to think so much as This is a dumb idea, he tackled Sam. Quills pierced his shirt and tore his skin, but they weren’t nearly so bad as the bullets that struck the wall where the hedgehog had stood moments before.

  Sam breathed through small, needle-sharp teeth. He was bleeding, too. Stone chips from the ricochet. His eyes went out of focus.

  Liam shook Sam by the shoulders. Sam’s teeth clicked. “What?” Groggy, unsteady, but—Liam hoped—grateful.

  “I need to get up there. To her. Now. Something in this goddamn”—venial again, adding up—“market must be able to help. You know the place. I don’t. Come on. Stay with me. How can I help you?”

  Sam drew a low, wet breath, and pointed with one claw across the emptying courtyard. A shining pearl eight feet across lay near the reflecting pool, surrounded by cracked stone. The dragon football must have fallen in the attack. “Fly.”

  “Thank you,” Liam said. He didn’t ask how he was supposed to reach the pearl across an open killing field. He didn’t ask how he was supposed to use the thing if he made it there in one piece. Control surfaces? Magic words? No time. He let Sam go, and ran.

  • • •

  Grace burned.

  She fed minutes and seconds and hours to the flame. Days. She felt no pain as she burned, just pressure and absence, like peeling dried glue from her skin. She would have spent that time some other way, if she had not spent it now: Reading. Talking with Arturo, or Asanti, or Sal. Dancing to French pop while no one was watching. Sipping a bellini, or having sex. Frying eggs. Breathing spring. Groaning at Liam’s jokes.

  She spent it saving his life, instead.

  Her relationship with curse and candle raised a few interesting philosophical questions. The faster she burned, the faster she moved, thought, felt, lived. But the speed boost only applied to her, not to any watch she might carry; they’d never been able to measure
just how much faster she was moving compared to the outside world. Was the effect linear, pushing more seconds into her subjective experience? Might there be some point of diminishing returns? Or did the curve tend the other way: Did she gain more time the faster she burned? Could she burn so fast she’d live forever between the ticks of a clock?

  She never mentioned these questions to Asanti. The archivist, or one of her eager new assistants, might want to experiment.

  Grace didn’t waste time. But she didn’t mind idle speculation, especially when no one could keep pace with her to talk.

  She climbed the nearest building in a blur. Rooftops, fine. She’d counted eight snipers from the ground. Sneak up behind the first one, he’s noticed the sound, whatever, take his rifle away, hit him with it, remove the magazine, toss the rifle into the courtyard. Sprint to the next roof, the next sniper, while the first is still falling, while his rifle’s still on its long upward arc. Easy.

  Weeks burned: of rivers, of Venice, of ice skating, of lips and pages and the steam off a fresh cup of tea. Weeks of nuns padding past her door to matins. Weeks of cloth against skin, weeks of breath, of feeling, of being. A month.

  By the time she reached the third sniper, he knew something was up. Two of his brother and sister soldiers had collapsed, rifles streaking into the sky like an armament-happy spitting fountain—he’d have had to be pretty dense not to notice. He couldn’t do anything about it, but he knew, and knowing, Sal kept saying, was half the battle.

  Whatever that meant.

  The fourth sniper swung her rifle around and took a shot, which Grace dodged. The fifth was ready, for all it helped him. Six. Seven. Eight, at last. And, in spite of everything, Liam was not dead.

  Saving him, she’d lost six weeks, four days, nine hours, and four minutes of life—you could fall in love in that time, in less—and gained as many nevers. Which would she choose? Never hiking to the North Pole? Never drinking until she threw up in Paris? Never reading Finnegans Wake, never skating on a frozen river?

  There you are, Liam, she thought after the eighth sniper fell. I give you these, my nevers, and your life. I hope you’re happy.